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- Louise Pound

One of the dominant urges of Western culture, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, has been to collect (the eBay phenomenon is perhaps the greatest contemporary example of this urge, where even the most trivial items have become objects of desire). While much of this collecting has been the stuff of museums - sometimes art, other times artefact, and oftentimes the trophies of the colonized and defeated - it also extended beyond physical objects to the beliefs, the practices, the stories, and the songs of other cultures. This ethnological collecting was motivated by a genuine concern, felt most acutely in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that cultures worth our attention were rapidly disappearing as new lands were settled and European influence extended into even the most remote places. Of course, there was a certain irony that this kind of salvage ethnography took place in the wake of colonization and was conducted by members of those colonizing cultures, but in many cases what was salvaged by these outsiders proved to be a valuable resource in later attempts to revive lost or threatened cultural traditions.

Within the United States, it wasn't long before people started realizing that the spread of industrialization and mass culture, which was much slower in more isolated regions like Appalachia, was similarly threatening old folkways. The collecting of African-American culture was first prompted by the Emancipation Act of 1834, when three abolitionists, William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, published a book containing Slave Songs of the United States (1867), but it was only later that serious attention was paid to Euro-American folk culture. The Journal of American Folklore, founded in 1888 as the quarterly publication of the American Folklore Society, was and remains one of the most important scholarly vehicles for the study of American folkways. In its pages could be found catalogues of oral traditions and folk culture, enshrined in print for posterity. With the publication of the book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), John Lomax proved there was a popular as well as an academic desire for this kind of material. While his work for the Library of Congress is well known, as is that of his son Alan, a lesser known work from the 1920s stands out as perhaps the best collection of early Americana.

American Ballads and Songs, published in 1922, was the work of an English language professor at the University of Nebraska named Louise Pound (1872-1958). A first for its comprehensive treatment of the subject matter and its thematic (rather than regional or chronological) arrangement, this book was a collection of Euro-American ballads both of old and new world origin (it even includes some selections from Canada). Louise Pound obtained her PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 1900 and made it her life's work to document and analyse American folklore in ballad form. She was also president of the American Folklore Society from 1925-27.

Pound's criteria for choosing these songs, drawn from her own field research and from other text sources, was to collect what the people who sang these songs valued rather than making an aesthetic judgement based on what she deemed worthy. Underlying her whole outlook is the insistence that real folk music is oral, not fixed by print, and therefore always changing - a unique standpoint at a time when folklorists and ethnologists would commonly piece together what they considered "the master" story or song by combining the details of multiple versions. Pound's criteria for what she did and did not collect is stated very clearly in her introduction: "Genuine folk-songs are not static but are in a state of flux; they have been handed down through a fair period of time; and all sense of authorship and origin has been lost." It was her goal to salvage what she could of this oral culture before it disappeared.

And indeed, for someone interested in traditional music, and the murder ballad in particular, this collection is a gold mine. Reading through the pages, familiar details and verses constantly surface. The name Willie turns up in so many of these ballads that it becomes almost comic when, once again, he ends up killing someone. One of the more famous songs he appears in, known within bluegrass circles as "The Banks of the Ohio," is printed here in two forms, one placing the incident on the banks of the Shawnee River, and the other on the Pedee River. The variations themselves are interesting; while preserving the general idea of the song, each version has its own flavour and slightly different implications. Take for example the following verse from the first version: He drew a knife across her breast/And in anger she did cry/"O Willie dear, don't murder me/For I am not fit to die." In version two, a slightly different and more familiar angle: From my breast I drew a knife/And she gave a shrilling cry/"O Willie dear, don't murder me/For I am not prepared to die."

While most of these songs are virtually unknown today, it is a pleasure to see that some are still being performed. I recognized a song called "The Creole Girl," collected by Pound in Iowa, because a version appears on The Be Good Tanyas' 2001 release, Blue Horse, under the title "Lakes of Pontchartrain." A song called "The Gambler," about a young man sentenced to death, shares elements with "Upon the Blue Ridge Mountains," which was a favourite of Jerry Garcia and also appears on The Bills debut CD, The Bill Hilly Band (their former band name). Though the song has a different overall theme, it shares the refrain Hang me, O hang me, and I'll be dead and gone, but instead of the more familiar ending I wouldn't mind your hangin' boys, but you wait in jail so long/Oh lord, I been all around this world, the lyrics have a more existential bent: I wouldn't mind the hangin', it's bein' gone so long/It's layin' in my grave so long.

"The Dying Cowboy" is an interesting example of an old song that seems to have been re-written in more poetic form later on. This song has the line Beat your drums lowly, and play your fife slowly/Play the dead march as you bear me along, which appear in a song called "St. James Hospital," which was recorded by Doc Watson and attributed to a man named James Baker (available on The Essential Doc Watson, Watson actually learned it from a Pete Seeger record). While the songs are similarly themed, the latter version recorded by Doc Watson is much richer in its imagery, and is a much more beautiful and sad ballad. The song "Poor Omie," about the killing of a young girl, has a similarly more poetic edge on the Doc Watson version, "Little Omie Wise."

Bob Dylan fans will recognize "The House Carpenter" (see text sidebar), which The Watson Family also recorded, from an early live performance included on The Bootleg Series (it has also been recorded by Tony Rice and, most recently, by Nickel Creek). While the Watson Family follows closely the version found in American Songs and Ballads, Dylan adds two verses to the song, just before the final two verses, that lend the song a whole different dimension, suggesting that the man who has carried the house carpenter's wife off to sea is not of this world at all:

Oh what are those hills yonder, my love
They look as white as snow
Those are the hills of heaven, my love
You and I'll never know

Oh what are those hills yonder, my love
They look as dark as night
Those are the hills of hell-fire my love
Where you and I will unite

While the original song suggests that something unholy might be going on (she is wearing scarlet red, after all), and the sudden sinking of the boat is referred to as a curse, there is an element of the supernatural in how easily the woman is tempted away from her husband and child. Lured by the promise of a voyage to an exotic land, in both versions we are to understand that where she ultimately ends up is Hell.

Perhaps Louise Pound's main shortcoming in American Ballads and Songs is her assertion that the variations found in folk songs "are instinctive and unconscious, not deliberate," like some kind of cultural broken telephone was at work. By insisting that these variations were purely unintentional, Pound not only denies the creativity of the early singers she collected these songs from (and the people these singers learned their songs from), but she also reduces the poetic power of the songs themselves. Although she may not have recognized it, her book stands as a testament to the depth and brilliance of these folk traditions.

GB